In this tutorial we are going to see how to create a website and deploy to the cloud Azure with in minutes of time. On June 7th 2012, Microsoft announced the Meet Azure Edition with new features and enhancements. Once of the cool feature is the Websites, with this feature we can create website using ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC and deploy to cloud directly from Visual Studio 2012 or we can use a list of available open source application from the gallery. Today in this tutorial we are going to see how to do a website in Visual Studio 2012 and deploy it directly to the New Azure Portal in Websites. [more]

Let us see the step by step process on how to achieve this task in Windows Azure, first let us login to the Windows Azure Portal using the link http://Windows.Azure.com with a valid windows Azure credentials. If we don’t have a valid credentials Microsoft has provided option to register and try window Azure for 3 months with free subscription. With this New Meet Azure Edition we can deploy up to 10 websites free of cost for 1 year if we register with the trial subscription of 3 months. Once we login to the portal we can see the HTML5 based Management portal with the list of available components as shown in the screen below.

If we don’t see Website option in the list of available components then we need to register for the preview from the Preview Features section. Once we register the product team will activate the process and we can see the websites at the left menu as shown in the screen above. Next is clicking on Web Sites we can see the options through which we can create the websites like We can create a Quick Website, Create Website with Database and finally We can create a Website from a list of Open source application available in the Gallery as shown in the screens below.

Now let us take the first option Quick Create, with this option we can create a websites quickly. To start with first provide a valid URL name and select the region and click on Create Website as shown in the screen below.

We can see the website is created and the status will be showing as Running in the list of available websites, to explore further we can click on the website name and it will take you to the Dashboard as shown in the screens below.

Click directly on the Name (f5debug) and we can see the page navigates to the Dashboard which has the complete details as shown in the screen below.

The Dashboard provides the complete details of the website running over the Azure Cloud. Now we need to design our website which should be uploaded to the website which we created. We will create a website using ASP.NET MVC3 using Visual Studio 2012 and deploy it to the cloud website which we created in our previous steps. To start with first download the publish Profile from the list of quick glance available, this public profile is the setting file for the website which has the complete details on the subscription, username, password etc. as shown in the screen below.

Next step is to open Visual Studio 2012 RC and create a new ASP.NET MVC application with a valid project name as shown in the screen below. We can create any of the Web application as per the requirement that can be deployed to the Azure directly.

Make small changes to the application which can be used to test it once we deploy our application to the azure environment. Once we complete the design we can build and test the application once and we can see the end result as seen in the screen below.

Now right click on the project and click on publish to start publishing the project as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on publish will open a new window where we need to provide the downloaded publish settings file.

Click on Import and select the downloaded Publish settings from the desktop as shown in the screen below.

Then validate the connection using the button provided at the bottom, here we can preview the website as well if required to test the application is working perfectly.

Click on Preview in the left menu and select the Click on Preview button to preview the website as shown in the screen below.

Now click on publish to start publishing the application to the Azure environment, we can see the status in the output window of the Visual Studio as shown in the screen below.

Now the application is published successfully, we can see the website opened in a new window as shown in the screen below.

Now let us go back to Windows Azure management portal and we can see in the Dashboard we have some little traffic available as shown in the screen below.

See now its very simple to develop an application using ASP.NET and deploy to the cloud in minutes using the new features that has been released recently in Meet Azure by Microsoft. That’s it for today, keep looking in to this blog to get the latest updates and tutorials on the latest technology, until then happy programming.

About Author:
Karthikeyan Anbarasan, Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) in ASP.NET/IIS Architecture. He is the Founder and Chief Editor of the www.f5debug.net website and has authored books on Windows Phone and Business Intelligence(SSIS). He is also a Passionate Speaker and a Blogger on Microsoft Technologies.

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This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. For accuracy and official reference refer to MSDN/ TechNet. I have documented my personal experience on this blog.